


the miracle is in the execution

by chagrin



Series: (interlude) to the apocalypse [1]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Bleeding Effect, Gen, Psychological Trauma, essentially psychobabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-21
Updated: 2013-09-21
Packaged: 2017-12-27 06:22:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chagrin/pseuds/chagrin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clay Kaczmarek isn’t afraid of dying, only of never being found.</p><p>Or: the convergence of fatalism, death, and what comes after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the miracle is in the execution

.. / .- — / -. —- - / .- .-.. .. …- .

The end. Almost the end.

The past is the future, and he is the present, he is the inversion of the truth made whole, a walking paradox of corrosive blood and shredded tendons under skin membrane. He is hollowed out in metamorphosis, contorting into something not quite entirely human anymore, and in regards to the being he has become, dilapidation is the prerequisite for any fledgling martyr to the cause.

Power doesn’t die, it’s passed on. In this case, it’s to a man he’s never even met, much less ever known; he’s given everything up for the veneer of a messiah waiting in the wings. Help Desmond Miles. God, he hates him. As the end approaches, this resentment merely quadruples in intensity. _Chiudi il becco, coniglio. Le navi hanno raggiunto il molo. C’è ancora tempo._

Civilization will always come to pass, in the end. It’s obstinate that respect, endlessly elliptical, a contagion without an antidote. He is one step away from the virus. He is one step away from the cure. This, too, is an immutable fact set in stone, petrified to rot and decay long after he’s gone. Minutes will pass, only for him to beg some malevolent crusader the seconds later on. They engineered the war, they engineered the peace.

Behold, _behold_ , **behold** , Adam and Eve, Abel and Cain. He bites his tongue over vernacular with broken spines.

Every artery in his body trills sickly, the network of veins and capillaries clotting off where he’s severed the lines, which pulsate lividly. A penultimate signal to his ensuing demise, he supposes; second-rate fanfare for every tool screwed to high hell. Noncommittally, he stares at the stigmata on his wrists, the mark of Christ over forearms with a passive air to the fractured indentations. Not bad, for a ballpoint pen.

As pieces to a whole, red streaks the walls, reeks heavily of rust and conspiracies sewn to plaster and whitewash. In the rapidly dissolving compartmentalization between Clay Kaczmarek and Ezio Auditore and every other ghost in the machine, the headaches amplify. It’s all blurring together. Paradoxically, they are empty and whole. _Nulla è reale, tutto è lecito. Requiescat in pace._

They were mostly heroes. That had to be enough, now. That was what mattered.

 **People only see what they’re trained to see.** There are no exceptions. Twenty pieces, locked beneath glyphs and the discombobulated litany of a madman. He will fade, but he will still be alive (in snapped digital fragmentation, divided and alone, but conscious nonetheless), and perhaps that is what frightens him more. To enter the _Abyss_ and never return, to wait in the silence and the undulating darkness, eaten up by shadows, nothing more than a husk, than a poltergeist in every sense of the word.

One of Those Who Came Before is at his ear again, mouth curved in the shape of a promise, a saving redemption for all those destined for the slaughterhouse. He pleads willful blindness, but he can see every collapsed galaxy that awaits in superimposed clarity, their annihilation on the head of a pin.

In the pantomime of optical illusions, Juno dissipates in the wake of another woman, one who wears her halo as her silhouette. Bill’s machinations return in damning absolution. _Lucy will **save** you._ It’s a throwback to the bygone tales of heroines and their bitter unmaking. His own veritable Joan of Arc, made flesh.

Lately, he’s noticed things about her. A certain kindness embalming her eyes, the altruism of a saint with none of the bluntness; she is always weightless, even as she falters in severity. Her cruelty was an arduous process. Lucy will never let him die as he is. Too late, though. Too _fucking_ late.

She staggers forward now, accidental horror emanating from every fiber in her body. Bones and ligaments twisted in brittle semantics, knuckles clenched with fingers in morse code, dialing down through the interconnected web of binary code and satellites from her cell. Her voice is tinny, quivering, so distant in comparison to the cacophony in his head.

It’s a real shame she doesn’t smile back. He would’ve liked to keep that with him, at least.

He is by no means gullible, but he is susceptible to the sentimental. Nothing’s changed. Everything’s changed. He will die a number, a single notation in the grand scheme of the universe. Weeks onto weeks of planning, and yet — _yet_ , this is strangely unsatisfying. Dad doesn’t know Clay’s found his purpose and his damnation, or that they are one and the same, It’s all part of the wrong context, at any rate. He stares beyond all the alternate realities and doomed timelines to the skylight, dispassionately out of his reach.

It’s getting harder. All the pain across time, it hurts too much. It’s time to get out.

In the beginning, Genesis. _Genesis._

He isn’t allowed to leave until Desmond Miles **understands**. Because it’s in their blood. _Because it’s in their blood._

_**It’s in their blood.** _

_"Ah, the moon. I can see the stars. My mind is gone. Lucy, I can’t wait any longer. I’m ready to go."_

.

She sees him raise the knife.


End file.
